Article ID: CBB000770715

Storytelling, Statistics and Hereditary Thought: The Narrative Support of Early Statistics (2006)

unapi

This paper's main contention is that some basically methodological developments in science which are apparently distant and unrelated can be seen as part of a sequential story. Focusing on general inferential and epistemological matters, the paper links occurrences separated by both in time and space, by formal and representational issues rather than social or disciplinary links. It focuses on a few limited aspects of several cognitive practices in medical and biological contexts separated by geography, disciplines and decades, but connected by long term transdisciplinary representational and inferential structures and constraints. The paper intends to show a given set of knowledge claims based on organizing statistically empirical data can be seen to have been underpinned by a previous, more familiar, and probably more natural, narrative handling of similar evidence. To achieve that this paper moves from medicine in France in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century to the second half of the nineteenth century in England among gentleman naturalists, following its subject: the shift from narrative depiction of hereditary transmission of physical peculiarities to posterior statistical articulations of the same phenomena. Some early defenders of heredity as an important (if not the most important) causal presence in the understanding of life adopted singular narratives, in the form of case stories from medical and natural history traditions, to flesh out a special kind of causality peculiar to heredity. This work tries to reconstruct historically the rationale that drove the use of such narratives. It then shows that when this rationale was methodologically challenged, its basic narrative and probabilistic underpinings were transferred to the statistical quantificational tools that took their place.

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Description Explores shift to a statistical explanation of hereditary phenomena by looking at 18th-century French medicine and 19th-century English natural history.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000770715/

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Authors & Contributors
Wynn, James
Vallejo, Mauro Sebastián
Xu, Chuansheng
Stockland, Etienne
Sober, Elliott R.
Smith, Pamela H.
Concepts
Heredity
Probability and statistics
Evolution
Naturalists
Medicine
Mathematics
Time Periods
19th century
18th century
20th century
20th century, early
Enlightenment
17th century
Places
France
Great Britain
Institutions
École Polytechnique, Paris
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